Special Edition

I know I am supposed to update this thing once a week, but this is special "thank you" edition.

"When I count my blessings...I count you twice. "

Decorating Sense

I found myself flipping through IKEA catalog and watching Trading Spaces again. I know, I am a big dork. I love that stuff! Cushioned swivel chair, or Spanish blue tiles, or elaborate carvings on the window frame, or glass pendulant lamps, they are exciting. I literarilly think my brain receives extra stimulus from color, shape, texture and patterns. I would totally love a movie (ex Hero) just because the visual or aural effects were amazing. Once I took a psych analysis, I am an abstract holistic person, meaning I have strong preferences for symbols over prose, theories over experience, top-down hiearchy over chronicle sequence. That also explains why my thoughts are all over the place, and I may have random responses to your questions and I don’t follow you exactly sometimes because some bizarre interpretation formed in my head. I think most of my friends would testify to that.

I would’ve went to to study interior design I think, if it weren’t for my dad’s ultimatum, “I ain’t paying tuition for you to play with paintbrushes!” So I am stuck with biochemistry. I guess I have to reconcile with DNA and proteins, which to my small comfort also have form, mass and shape, and occassionaly colors depending how expensive the book is.

There are very few outlets for creativity. My room at home is off the limit, so I have put much effort into my dorm room. I must’ve rearranged the furnitures ten times in the tiny cubicle of mine back in Kennedy Hall. I was very pround of the Tuscan iron magazine holder and the simplistic picture of daisies I digged out of a fundraising sale at that art studio on St. Stephens Street. Most people seemed to also like the work I have done with the old poster of a rose and four pieces of foam board. Most people, that is, except my mother, who thought it looked hideously bright. She thinks bright colors in the bedroom disturbs sleeping. I still went on with my little decorating sense. Ann laughed at my idea of tucking the drawer between the wall and the bed, but I did get more space, enough for the armchair.

I know I am going to be obssessed whenever and however I get a mansion of my own, where I don’t have to worry about getting billed for nailing things into the wall, or the heater baking my three succulent plants to death in the winter.

Never Let Me Go

A weekend of fun, and apparently I have no memory of certain parts of it, but feeling really good after all that craziness. Once in a while you need a little laugh-your-head-off and shout-your-lungs-out refreshment.

Finished Kazuo Ishiguro’s “Never Let Me Go”. I couldn’t put it down. I always loved his other book “Remains of the Day” but this one is even better. Cried myself a river at the end, but I am one of those morbid creatures that prefer Gothic sad stories.

The place is England, the time is 1990s. Kathy, Tommy and Ruth had been best friends since infancy. They shared an amazing childhood together. There were intense drama and good humor in their little clique of friends and between rival groups. They were competitive at sports, struggled in art classes, and obsessed endlessly about sex. Now that they are older and have gone on different paths, the thing that still holds them together is no more than the belief that the only way to change their tragic destiny is to prove a couple is truly in love, but there are three of them. As they reminisce and discover more about their mysterious upbringing in the exclusive boarding school, they came to realize that the belief they have held so dear is false. Nothing can change their fate, not even true love.

Now a little bit about the setting, which is fictional. It distinguishes the book from a chick-flick. It’s actually a science fiction with a futuristic tone but set in the past. Kathy, Tommy and Ruth are actually three among thousands of cloned babies that have been brought up for the sole purpose of donating vital organs to cure diseases such as cancer and dementia. Since WWII, the world has come to depend on these cloned babies to provide organs, and because so many people’s lives depended on the donation program, the whole society justifies it by believing the clones are just test tube creatures without souls. These cloned babies have been told and accepted their fate, because the conditions in which they were kept alive merely to provide organs were so horrible they have no desire to live anyway.

What’s special about Kathy, Tommy and Ruth is that they grew up in Hailsham, which is a boarding school that used to be part of a humanist movement to prove that these cloned babies do have souls and that they are human (not unlike the Civil Rights Movement). They were provided the best education and care. The first part of the book mainly described the wonderful childhood they all shared without alluding to the fact that they are any different than you and me. In fact, they had been sheltered, kept away from the truth of their fate. They knew they had to go through a life of donating organs, but they always believed that you can get out of it by proving that you are really in love. That belief held them together, but it was shattered as they came to find out in the real world. The second part of the book is in elegiac suspense as they put the pieces to the puzzle together.

In the end, Tommy said to Kathy, “And these two people in the water, trying to hold onto each other, holding on as hard as they can, but in the end it’s just too much. The current’s too strong. They’ve got to let go, drift apart. That’s how I think it is with us. It’s a shame, because we’ve loved each other all our lives. But in the end, we can’t stay together forever.”

The not-letting-go sentiment is multifold. On one level, it’s holding on to people and things we love. On the second level, it’s hanging on to feelings and beliefs. And at a bigger picture, it’s the society keeping grip on its morals and ethics. If you are preserving something that you know in your heart could not remain, what will fill that empty spot once it’s gone? Isn’t it enough to have memories of how it used to be? What exactly is lost, when you come to find out you will never have something you thought you were able to obtain? Blissful expectancy or deceptive ignorance?

Lucky 12

Feeling extremely lucky today.

Received the loooonnng-waited Federal Tax Return check. I had lost the original one as well as any hope of ever getting that money. But it arrived just in time for much needed cash relief. Ca-ching! Ca-ching! Now I am gonna spend it in Greece, on buying wine. Sinfully delicious!

It was one of the very few days that I got home before my mom so I opened the mailbox. It was full of goodies: the check, a postcard from AZ with my head shot taped to a Japanese Macaques pic (what a shocker!!), and a curious monkey notepad from the fabulous Las Vegas (the instructed usage is for ease of jotting down numbers). Gracias!!

Love the hardway

watched "Love the Hardway" with Adrian Brody for the million and tenth time!


Do you have the heart to save a fallen angel?
Can you see his indifferent face in the crowd of a thousand happy little souls? Do you know not to ask him why he looks so miserable but just to embrace him anyway? Have you the patience to wait up for him when he is out there taking out his rage against the world on a rampage? Are you courageous enough to accompany him to hell and bring him back with you? And most importantly, how strong is your faith, you belief that he is an angel, fallen from the sky, instead of a devil risen from hell? And that with your love, he can let go of the past, get out of his shell and warm up to you. Why do you think you are doing this? Are you playing his savior to satisfy your own conscience?